Man Must Travel to Mars, Garn and Astronauts Say

Man Must Travel to Mars, Garn and Astronauts Say

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Human beings have yet to walk on Mars' face, and it isn't for lack of smarts.

"It is not the technology to go to Mars or other planets or back to the moon," former Utah senator and space traveler Jake Garn said Saturday. "The problem is funding. I am convinced we could be on Mars now, be there sometime from 2005-2010, if the funding had been approved by Congress."

Garn and about a half-dozen astronauts and cosmonauts are in the middle of a five-day meeting in Salt Lake City to prepare for the Association of Space Explorers' annual Planetary Congress, to be held here in October.

Garn said the U.S. funding for food stamps last year was more than double NASA's budget.

Were that not the case, manned trips to Mars would be a reality, Garn said. His fellow space travelers agreed, convinced that the milestone is in mankind's near future.

"I think it's about time to get bold support behind President Bush's goal to go back to the moon and Mars," Austrian Franz Viehbok said. He said that once, when asked whether humans will have been to Mars by century's end, he replied, "What an embarrassment if we have not."

Russia's Alexei Leonov, who became the first person to leave a spacecraft and "walk" in space on March 18, 1965, agreed that the time is now.

"In 1987, in the (Planetary) Congress, we discussed the question of flight to Mars," Leonov said through an interpreter Saturday. "This was so long ago. There was lots of interesting reports, but it was very early for this discussion. The people weren't ripened to talk about this. Now we see a different situation. All continents are discussing the possibility of flights to Mars."

Leonov credits the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which he said "have gotten us another step closer.

"This woke up everyone on Earth about the possibility of Mars exploration. Somehow Mars has become closer, closer for the leaders of countries who help finance this possibility. You can see now that this is a realistic discussion."

Leonov said space experts now have experience with long space flights and the technology for long-term life support in space.

Space travel does more than fulfill mankind's curiosity about space, the group agreed, making moot the question, "Why would we waste so much money in space?"

"We have never wasted a dime in space. There are no stores in space. All the money has been spent on Earth," Garn said. The result, he said, benefits business, creates jobs and spawns technology that can be used for health, travel and a host of other everyday benefits.

When the Planetary Congress convenes in October, they plan to pool their knowledge through a series of technical sessions and seminars. They also want to spread the excitement to Utahns with a community outreach day that they hope will see an astronaut or cosmonaut visit every school district in the state.

Educating kids about space flight will instill "a wonder of the greatness of engineering and science," said American Bo Bobko, who has been on three space flights and commanded the flight that took Garn to space. "They will look at technology in a different way."

The eye-opening effect of space travel alone is a tremendous benefit to mankind, he said.

"We'll get a lot of questions if we go to Mars. And our society does not progress without questions."

Governments across the country should be looking, right now, for the team of young people who will one day visit Mars, Leonov said.

"This needs to be special people. . . . They need to be aware of all corners of our Earth," he said.

It is this international awareness that the Association of Space Explorers' astronauts and cosmonauts touted not only as an important trait for would-be space travelers but also an invaluable benefit of space travel itself.

"The relationships, the friendships that are built up, we don't have problems with each other," Garn said of his international friends in the field of space. "Politicians need to start understanding that. We're all human beings traveling on Spaceship Earth together. . . . How much we admire each other, that spreads" to the general public, fostering international understanding and peace.

From space, there are no borders. The space travelers on Saturday said they wish more people on Earth could see it that way.

They said a climate exists on Earth where cooperative, multinational space exploration can be a reality.

"Thirty years ago, the situation in the world, there was a lot of tension. Then there appeared some very smart people. . . . They were the first to understand the catastrophe that was happening in the world. We need to show everybody in the world that we have a bigger task at hand," Leonov said through his translator.

Then, in English: "Together, we are better."

< Several things to point out here. First of all, of all the places you could get the money from, things that help people's basic human rights and dignity, like food, are most certainly not the place. The cause is of course completely worth-while and there are many places we can get the money from that won't flat out hurt people. Finally, This cuts at the heart of how capitalism is wrong. It puts money on a pedastal above and beyond anything which is actually good for humanity like food or curiosity. Of course this also means business is made more important than individuals, using two imaginary concepts against one real one. An individual's life is important, money and business are constructs designed to help that, and now they hurt it instead. Also Big Business, which is by far the farthest from helping people, has the most power. >